Top town: South Berwick named best place in Maine to raise children

SOUTH BERWICK. Maine — It was a Friday at Central School in South Berwick and the first graders were learning how to use snowshoes with the help of teacher Kristan Tiede in the outdoor classroom.

“I love looking for animal prints,” Silja Pope said. “You have to be really careful and go around to look at them.”

Trevor Amergian likes racing around in his snowshoes the best.

The outdoor classroom, which officially opened last May with lots of community support, includes paths, a log walk, an outdoor amphitheater, gardens and a hoop house. Children perform plays, go on walks, plant seedlings, grow food and have cooking lessons with parent volunteers and local cooks.

Central School, which serves students from preschool to 3rd grade, is a big part of why South Berwick was named the best place in Maine to raise kids by Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Dec. 17.

Bloomberg Rankings and BusinessWeek evaluated 3,200 towns nationwide who had populations between 5,000 and 50,000. They looked at a variety of indicators including public school performance, safety, median income and unemployment with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI and Greatschools.org, a national source for school ranking information. Other factors included cost of housing, average commute time, poverty level, portion of households with children, adults' educational attainment and diversity.

South Berwick, with a population of 7,219, benefited from a GreatSchools.org score of eight out of ten.

“We have the most amazingly connected teachers,” Nina D'Aran, Central School principal, said. “All the staff are continual learners who go above and beyond what's required. There's also tons of parents that volunteer and make the school really feel like a community,” she added.

Many residents believe the reason South Berwick is so great is because of the community.

Paulina Pope, Silja's mother, is a stay-at-home mom who has lived in South Berwick for over ten years. She volunteers at the outdoor classroom.

“There's a real sense of community here,” she said. “People really work together, regardless of political views.”

Pope moved here from Boston, which she had loved, but thought was too noisy, polluted and busy.

“South Berwick is a great little town with a real village,” Pope said. “People don't just come here to sleep.”

One perfect example of why South Berwick is so great is the South Berwick Public Library, according to library director Karen Eger. The community worked together to raise over $1 million to renovate a new building for the library, which opened last March.

“And we did this in a recession,” Eger said.

The town is currently putting together a skating rink with the support of volunteers.

Nora Irvine raised her kids in a more rural part of the town.

“My kids loved growing up in South Berwick for a reason BusinessWeek probably didn't consider,” she said. “We live in the rural part of town where there are woods and fields and a couple of real working farms. Both kids spent endless days splashing around in the vernal pools and playing in the woods with the neighbor kids. They still think they grew up in paradise.”